Spring Break!

I’m in California during Spring Break!

I’m gonna chill a bit and take it easy for a week, but I might bring back some funny pictures when I get back:)

Triceratopsy

a drawing & a print I did of half-triceratops, half-otherthing. I’m no too happy with the finished drawing, so until I fix it up or stuff it under my bed to forget about it, that’s all the picture of it I have for now. I want a tricerapuppy… I feel so intelligent knowing dinosaurs names and stuff…

Making clay look like paper

These are my very first ceramic series. Made from clay slabs, cut into patterns so they roll, layer up and twist like paper or fabric. Still just bisque fired. Right now I’m waiting for the glaze result on my other practice pieces, so I can decide how to glaze these guys. I’m kinda disliking the underglaze painting I did on these, but at least I’ll know what not to do on my next pieces.

Old stuff

Just opened my harddrive and went through some of my highschool stuff…all the observational stuff were crap. There’s no content in them whatsoever. These are somewhat more intentional drawings/paintings. (just, somewhat, a tad bit more intentional)

turns out the amount of time I spend on someting is inversely proportional to how much I like them three years later.

painting

Bellpeppers have such pretty yellow color that I cannot reproduce, like sunflowers.

It’s 5am, and I can’t paint.

Bipolar Stepper Motor

Instead of doing my laundry, I made this weird thing that makes funny noises.

It’s essentially a motor and a potentiometer(a turning dial). The rest is just styrofoam and wires.

I’ve programmed the Arduino under the styrofoam casing to continuously turn right and speed down as the dial reaches the mid point, turn direction when it pasts mid point and speed up as it reaches the other end.

To do this, you need a stepper motor. This one is a BIPOLAR stepper motor that I borrowed from Liubo. It has four wires coming out of it, and the first thing to do is to determine which is which with a truth table. (by measuring the resistance between each wires)

Here is my lovely hand-written note

You also need an H-Bridge chip to control the stepper motor. Keep in mind, an UNIPOLAR stepper motor needs a Darlington transistor instead & has 6 wires.

Here is a programming side of things on the Arduino software:

#include <Stepper.h>

#define STEPS 48         /*#of steps in each rotation of the motor, this value varies,and may need to be tested before.*/

Stepper stepper(STEPS, 9,10,11,12); //determine the order of the motor

void setup()
{
stepper.setSpeed(30);
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
int val = analogRead(0); //read the value of the potentiometer (0~1023)
if(val > 510){ //if the value is past the mid point from 0 to 1023…
stepper.setSpeed(((val-510)/10)+1); /*take the difference of the analogRead and the midpoint, divide it by ten & add 1 to the speed (the 1 avoids setting speed ot 0, which results in a lag)*/
stepper.step(1); //1 full rotation to the + direction & loop
}
if(val < 510){ //if the value is below the midpoint…
stepper.setSpeed(((510-val)/10)+1); //speed=difference/10 plus one
stepper.step(-1);  //1 full rotation to the – direction & loop
}

Serial.print(val);
Serial.println(“”); //print the actual analogRead value on Serial

}

This shows the yuppy innards underneath the oh so pretty styrofoam from some meat-product packaging. (the potentiometer wires are currently detached, due to wire-length restrictions)

so as the speed & the direction changes, the little arm attached to the motor makes different ticking noises as it makes circles & hits the bumps.

You can configure the circuit & the code however way it floats your boat, but you need to keep in mind that the pin numbers here:

Stepper stepper(STEPS, 9,10,11,12);

need to correspond to the correct wires in your motor to make it power the motor in a coherent order, so that the motor TURNS instead of maybe having a fit.

Now to ponder whether that was truely worth delaying my laundry run for another day…